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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (126172)	12/3/2009 9:34:22 AM
From: Bread Upon The Water	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543245

I too am soft on my facts here. I forever have to be careful not to put my Vietnam "overlay" on the Afghan experience. In VN we had the "white mice" (the VN National Police Force so named because they wore white helmets) that were sent out to the Villages to check ID's at both road and river junctions. Their reliability in a firefight was of great variety, and to be fair, they weren't supposed to function as Infantry. Now I have no idea where the staffing of the 160,000 Afghan police force (figure from this morning's WSJ) is supposed to come from and how they are going to be selected and who is going to pay them. Local police Chiefs selecting local villagers/tribesman? Some kind of national recruiting done all over the country with the police be sent where needed out of their local province? How much input is going to be given to the tribal chiefs and council in the use and deployment of the police? All details that seemingly would matter in the success or failure of the plan I am not even sure what the governmental structure is/looks like below the Kabul level. I've seen stories in the Times that had American Commanders sitting in with Tribal Chiefs and their council of elders, and then there are the village police chiefs and their men, and I don't know who gives them their marching orders. I'm sure if Holbrooke was sitting in on this dialogue he could supply the answers down to the nth degree and also explain how these various functionaries were supposed to mesh. Absent being invited to one of his briefings we'll just have to cobble this together as it unfolds--I guess.